The theology of conservative Judaism

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Arnold Jacob Wolf

Most of the faculty remained above the fray on living legal issues. Kaplan was pessimistic and outraged at the lack of progress. He saw equivocation as lethal.

In March 1962 [Kaplan] wrote in an embittered vein:

It has been forty years since I founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. In those same years I ran a school for teachers [the Seminary's Teacher's Institute], taught at the Seminary and at a school to train Jewish public servants. I devoted a great deal of time to the improvement of Jewish education and to the enhancement of Zionism. Along the way I published books and articles, all focused on the aim of restoring our people and our faith. Throughout, I endeavored to frame these tasks within a coherent ideology that cut to the core [of the problems]. But when I survey the fruit of my labors, I see precious little that augurs well for the future of Judaism. . . . In place of Torah and learning-ignorance; in place of a desire to unify the people - fragmentation into parties and a bitter rivalry; and instead of serious consideration of the crisis plaguing our faith-avoidance and recourse to empty phraseology. Compared with forty years ago, I think we have actually regressed. (II, p. 209)

The gurus Schechter and Lieberman avoided giving decisions. They believed, and most of the faculty with them, that the purpose of the Seminary was Torah Lishma, study for its own sake and not toward any kind of practical result. Louis Ginzberg and Boaz Cohen did write a large number of opinions on halakhic issues (some of them published for the first time now) in English, for the most part. They relied more on Talmud than on the later authoritative codes which their Orthodox opposite numbers would normally employ. Ginzberg founded and for long led, the Law Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, but, finally, he lost control to younger insurgent congregational rabbis, perhaps inevitably. The Rabbinical Assembly became the locus of the decision process, not the Seminary.

Faculty members were important in various successor committees on Jewish Law, and the Seminary synagogue, long under Lieberman's direction, was strictly Orthodox until recent times. When given an aliyah to the Torah, I was personally instructed to shake the hands of Professors Lieberman, Finkelstein, and Heschel in exactly that order of precedence. The Seminary was often referred to as a place where an Orthodox faculty trained Conservative rabbis to lead Reform congregations. There was a bitter truth in the joke, as well as an unfairly bitter accusation.

The most important decision in Seminary history was the ordination of women, described well in Chapter 30 of the second volume. It was mainly a political issue, which demonstrates the equivocal place of traditional halakba in recent Conservative Judaism. The Rabbinical Assembly under Wolfe Kelman threatened to admit an HUC woman rabbi. Many feminist Conservative Jews threatened to secede if women were not permitted to be rabbis. Polarization threatened the integrity of the movement. Some who opposed ordination on halakhic grounds, including some women and some younger Jews, were correct in holding that a meta-halakhic decision would mark a break with much of the movement's previous ideology. Gerson Cohen's change of heart, and the enormous power of his role and his personality, carried the day, but it is still not certain whether the decision was a mere pallid imitation of Reform trans-halakhic ethics or a bold move to lead American Judaism into new paths with new standards.